


divine

by Adversarial



Category: Eddsworld - All Media Types
Genre: < that's my new tag for any ship i write that isn't tomtord, Character Study, Cheating, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Enemies to Lovers, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Mental Instability, Mentions of Alcohol Abuse, Narcissism, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Unhealthy BDSM/Power Dynamic, Unhealthy Relationships, i can't believe it's not tomtord™, implied eating disorder, it's breaking my brand, matt has compensatory narcissism and is doing nothing about it, tord is kind of a shitty person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-24
Updated: 2018-04-24
Packaged: 2019-04-27 01:15:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14414484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adversarial/pseuds/Adversarial
Summary: He was brilliant, and cagey, and saw through your ruse instantly, which was startling and distressing in equal measures. But he never called you on your bluff (as he smiled at you over your breakfast, his face greasy with oil, not quite a leer but approaching it). Instead, he twisted it around on you-- he was vapid, and shallow, and violent, and lacked any shred of self-awareness.You loathed him because he was you.





	divine

**Author's Note:**

> "'cause the bad's been/ slowly gettin' worse,  
> and the fast lane/ livin' it's a curse,  
> so tell me/ what's your life worth?
> 
> _i think it's time for a change._ "

I. 

You realized very early on in life that things are considerably easier for you if you keep everyone's expectations low.

It's not a hard trick, once you get the hang of it. Sure, you keep an eye out for anything particularly threatening-- you are many things, after all, but genuinely stupid is not one of them-- and you can certainly make a smashing impression when you break character for a moment (and oh, they don't realize how grateful they should be that you don't do that more often), but. Well.

The truth is, you're tired.

So yes. You ignore what the people around you are saying, or implying, or doing behind closed doors. You smile, and you simper, and after a while the performance gets to you a little more than you'd like to admit, but honestly? That's alright with you. You may not like your mask, but it does a fine job of covering your (objectively beautiful) face, and that's all you can really ask for, isn't it? 

And if you occasionally need to perform a bit above your average calibre, you get to enjoy the warm fuzzy feeling of your friends' admiration as they compliment you for operating at a level above brain-dead. Another thing you'd realized very early in life-- you like being praised.

For all your conceits, you're not oblivious to yourself. You can recognize compensatory narcissism when it stares you right in the (subjectively godlike) face. You even enjoyed the online diagnostic quiz, in the same moderately cheerful, moderately apathetic way you enjoyed knowing your Hogwarts house or your Myers-Briggs type. You didn't know what empathy felt like per se, but you had been distressed enough by your lack of it to do some light Googling. 

But treatment took effort, and you were tired, and so you took the easy way out. And you dumbed yourself down. Enjoyed the shallow praise. Tended to your appearance fastidiously (because who would ever love you if you don't make yourself beautiful?) 

You made and kept very few friends, but that was acceptable so long as you could rely on them for a steady source of platitudes. Occasionally, you would toy with the idea of showing them more of your true self before becoming distressingly aware of how little you actually knew about your true self. 

So it went for years, as you became increasingly good at pretending and increasingly well-versed at ignoring the hollow in the center of yourself where your selfhood (soul?) was supposed to go.

And then Tord happened.

II. 

You realized, years later, after the dust had settled and you finally put the scattered pieces of yourself back together, that you could neatly divide your life into "before" and "after". 

III.

The problem with Tord was that he was a mirror. 

Now, normally you had no issue with mirrors. Quite the opposite, actually, at least when you had put some time into your appearance that day. You liked the affirmation of your beauty.

No. The problem with Tord was that he was a true mirror.

He was brilliant, and cagey, and saw through your ruse instantly, which was startling and distressing in equal measures. But he never called you on your bluff (as he smiled at you over your breakfast, his face greasy with oil, not quite a leer but approaching it). Instead, he twisted it around on you-- he was vapid, and shallow, and violent, and lacked any shred of self-awareness. 

You loathed him because he was you. You loathed him because every time you came too close to falling for his ruse, he'd tip his hand just enough to let you know that he didn't mean a word of it. You loathed him because you knew that he knew that you knew that he was mocking you, and nobody, least of all him, should have figured that out. 

He saw your mask and stole your mask and wore it to cover a smirk with too many yellowing teeth and you were livid.

Those were interesting days, the early ones. You hadn't felt anything as strongly as you felt hatred for him in years, so you dug your (perfectly manicured) fingernails in deep. You were furious with him and he laughed at you and your other two housemates couldn't see the carefully-choreographed pile of incidents and quote-on-quote accidents and I-could-have-prevented-that-but-I-didn'ts that kept stacking around the two of you like (not-yet-literal) corpses. They chalked it up to your idiocy and his hubris. As per usual, they had it entirely backwards.

IV.

Here is the scene.

You are sitting on the couch, spine proper and straight (wouldn't want to risk your perfect posture), reading a magazine. The TV is playing something irrelevant. Edd is in his room with his headphones on. Tom is out somewhere with his bass. Tord enters stage left, wearing the same unwashed hoodie he's been wearing for four days now, unshaven. He sits down next to you, sprawling his legs out and letting his head loll back. You can smell his unwashed body from two feet away. You wrinkle your nose at him.

"Have you considered showering," you spit, not looking up from your magazine. "My God, you reek."

"Considered, rejected," he says, lazily waving a hand in your direction. His accent is oppressively thick. "It doesn't bother me at all."

For whatever reason, after months of letting your resentment simmer, this is what makes you boil over. (Later, you'll overanalyze this moment. Now, all you see is _red_.) You slam your magazine down onto your lap.

"You're disgusting!" you shrill, knuckles white and shaking. "You greasy monstrosity! How do you live like this? Don't you realize that nobody else wants to put up with your smug asshole schtick? We get it, you don't care what anybody thinks of you! You're better than everyone! _I get it already_!" 

You pause to catch your breath and expect him to laugh at you, because if you were him, you would be laughing at you. He is your mirror, he's your mirror and he's played you like a goddamn violin, only this time--

He's beaming. "There you are," he breathes, grey eyes wide and uncharacteristically bright. His breath is rancid, but somehow this barely registers as he leans towards you. "I was wondering how long it'd take you to drop it."

"Drop... What?" For once, your confusion isn't an affectation. "Tord, what in the ever-loving hell--"

"See how much easier it is when you don't have to pretend? Come on, Matt. I know true idiocy when I see it. Don't play coy with me."

"I don't..." You flounder for a second, clenching and unclenching your hands into fists. He's violated an unspeakable rule and you are at a loss.

He laughs, and you realize that you've never heard him laugh before. Not really. Not like this. "You should see your face, pretty boy. It is _perfect_."

With that, he gets up and walks back to his room, still snickering, and you are left feeling terrifyingly exposed.

V. 

For all the years you spent asking yourself afterwards, you never did figure out why he did it: why he took a pair of shears to your thorns and took the time to methodically clip away at all of your defenses. For all your beauty, you weren't a particularly unique rose. 

At the time, you'd thought it was loneliness that drove him to seek you out, or desire for understanding. Empathy as opposed to sympathy. Right before he left and right after he broke your heart, you'd assumed covetousness, the desire to possess you, the rush of holding your soul in his hand and knowing that he could flex his fingers and leave you permanently mangled. 

Now, you think it was just to see if he could.

VI.

If you'd asked your housemates if they noticed a change after that, you're almost positive that they wouldn't have noticed. Tord stayed cagey. You stayed oblivious. For everyone but you two, the world continued to slowly turn. 

To you, the next month and a half had the life-overturning properties of a natural disaster. 

Tord shot you knowing looks constantly-- in the kitchen, in the hall, over Tom's head on the couch. And, slowly, he began to slip you details about himself. 

You learned about his childhood, in bits and pieces, from the names of small Norwegian towns that he would occasionally drop into conversation and your own incessant research. You learned about his political stances by sneaking casual glances over his shoulder to see which news sites he pulled up on his laptop every morning. You learned about his _thing_ with Tom, an on-again, off-again affair that left the two of them alternately tense and fucked-out lax, although that had been more of an open secret than Tom had realized. 

You learned, with surprise and surprising melancholy, the exact severity of his depression. 

You couldn't remember the last time you'd been this tuned into anything outside of yourself. You'd been tangled in your own head for so long that you'd forgotten how. He drew you out with subtle hints and a quick flashes of teeth that might have been smiles and he dangled pieces of himself just far enough out of your grasp that you were forced to expose yourself further in order to get to them. In this analogy (and in every other one, as you quickly learned), Tord held all of the cards and he knew it. 

He'd caught you.

VII.

Here is the scene.

You are alone with Tord in the car on your way back from the grocery store. It's midday, but the drizzling rain outside makes everything overcast and the lighting is almost poor enough to make you miss how bloodshot Tord's eyes are, or how sallow his cheeks have gotten over the past few weeks. Almost.

You haven't been alone with him in any meaningful capacity since _that one time_ (and, yes, you can hear the italics in your mind when you think it), and the anticipation has been a knife pressed very carefully to your intestines for the entire, entirely banal trip. You are five minutes away from home, Tord's gaze firmly focused on the road, and you're back to that constant, intrusive doubt that anything he's said or done has meant what you thought it has. You know you're obsessing; you are increasingly unconvinced that he is reciprocating.

He turns into your neighborhood, and you are aware of an opportunity slipping away from you. You grab his wrist suddenly, before you can even think about it (and in this moment, you are deliriously grateful for all of the experience you've had at not thinking), and say, "you're avoiding me."

His face splits into a grin, and you belatedly realize that he'd been giving you an out this whole time; you could have kept playing stupid and been spared the indignity of him stripping you further, of him vivisecting you with caffeine-trembling hands. You have transgressed and invited him in and your pulse shoots up immediately in panic and you are _relieved_. 

"What do you mean by that, pretty boy?" His words are soft, voice gravelly, and when he tilts his head to look at you, the collar of his t-shirt slips further down and exposes a two-day-old hickie. 

"You know exactly what I mean," you retort, a little too late, and he chuckles. 

"You seem to think very highly of me, friend, and while I appreciate it, I really do need you to elaborate," he says. He is no longer paying any mind to the road. That this isn't terrifying to you is indicative of exactly how scrambled your mind is at the moment.

His attention is heady, intoxicating. He isn't looking at you so much as into you, like your skin and skull are glass and he can watch every too-slow thought as it forms, crests, and breaks into your consciousness. 

You need it, you realize. You need him staring into you. The thought of going without makes your stomach turn. The thought of him looking at anyone else like he is looking at you is impossible, repulsive. 

He's pulled the car over in the time it's taken you to process this (your heartbeat physically painful in your ribs), leaned in, not quite close enough to perceive as an invitation, plausibly deniable. 

(You would like to say that you spared a thought to Tom's feelings in this moment, but you've never had a reputation for being considerate, have you?)

His lips are chapped and you can taste his bad breath in your mouth and it's _filthy_ and it's _wrong_ and you realize, very early in this game, that he is ultimately going to break you and leave you for the flies. 

Then he takes his hand off the steering wheel and buries it in your hair and _pulls_ and you stop thinking.

VIII.

You'd never done possessiveness before him, and he was a terrifying crash course. He held your secrets in the palm of his hand with an unknowable smile. You couldn't court him actively while maintaining your public facade, a facade that it seemed he was actively attempting to undermine for his own amusement. He had (and this hit you with a violent soreness) an _actual boyfriend_.

It petrified you when you finally realized how deep you were. Every glance, every grin, every kind word or gesture (not that they were particularly common, but still) that he lavished on anyone other than you felt like a physical sting, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to not lash out at your housemates. It took exactly one poorly-hidden scowl on your part for Tord to realize this, after which he proceeded to make your life a living hell. Tom, for his part, didn't seem to have any idea why his sex life had suddenly gotten much, much better, but didn't seem to offer any complaints. You were getting dangerously close to clawing your way out of your own skin.

But then sometimes, Tord had mercy on you. He'd make references in conversation meant for you and you only, or he'd wink whenever Edd said something particularly oblivious (which, you realized in a fit of dramatic irony, seemed to be the way the roles now played out in your home), and you would feel so warm that you'd swear you were glowing. He was the only one who understood you, the actual you, and you would tear off your fingers one by one for him if you'd thought for a moment he'd praise you for it.

You wished that were still hyperbole.

IX.

It was at around this point in time that Tom's life became inexplicably more difficult. 

It wasn't anything in particular so much as a number of small things. Karma seemed to be targeting him worse than usual, lately. Nothing that could be considered outside the boundaries of a particularly bad stroke of luck. When you asked him with a vapid smile how he was doing, was he alright, Tom, that looked painful?, Tom's face twitched before he forcibly leveled his tone and thanked you for your concern. 

If Tord reached over when Edd was looking away to pat your cheek, who would be the wiser? 

X. 

Here is the scene.

It is two in the morning when he silently opens the door to your room and pads over to your bed. In the moonlight from the window, you can see how his ribs jut out, casting sickly shadows on his pale skin. There are dark circles under his eyes and a bruise on his left cheek. 

"I thought you told me you were spending the night with your boyfriend," you whispered, and you couldn't keep yourself from smiling. 

"He saw the mess you made of my back, I'm afraid," Tord hummed, pulling the duvet off of you to expose your bare legs. Your briefs were a false modesty. "You've sentenced me to the doghouse, pretty boy."

"I'm so sorry," you say, as convincingly sympathetic as you can manage, just for the chill you get when Tord snorts and doesn't believe a word of it. You still can't hide anything from him, and the novelty of that is a sweet shock every time.

"You had better get to work making it up to me, then," he exhales, lips pushed up against your neck as he invades your personal space. 

His bony hands find their way around your wrists, pushing them up over your head and holding them there, forcing your back into an arch as you are flooded with wordless, indistinct excitement. He bites down hard against the junction of your neck and shoulder and you gasp, mind growing foggy as he renegotiates his grip and frees a hand to knead at your cock through your underwear. It doesn't take him long to push you deep into subspace, a happy incomprehension clouding your normally discomforting thoughts. 

Tord knows how you think. He knows what you need. He forces you open and pushes into you and it hurts but it's okay because he's telling you that he loves you, that you're a good boy, a pretty boy, and when he finishes and pulls out and slips out of your room, leaving you alone and dripping his cum on your sheets, you're too dizzy to know what to think.

XI.

The problems started when you developed a tolerance. 

The drug analogy was inevitable. He was your nicotine, your opiate, your cocaine-- whatever you wanted to call it, so long as it was habit-forming and ultimately disastrous. Because as time went on, you needed more from him to feel satisfied. 

Jealousy has teeth, and it wasn't long before you were snapping at Edd for getting too close to Tord, snapping at Tord for not giving you his undivided focus at all times. Tom's life was actively falling to shit under your careful diligence, and you made sure to keep the house's alcohol supply topped off just for him. When AA seemed to be working out a little too nicely, you slashed a tire on his car the night before his next meeting and then gave Tord a series of dark hickies. Tom slept on the porch that night and came back the next morning hungover and you basked in your own vindication.

Tord seemed unmoved by your desperation, so you changed tactics: you picked arguments with him over petty things, flung carefully-tailored insults just to watch him wince, anything you could think of to keep his focus on you and you alone. One time when you were feeling particularly desperate, you smashed his laptop screen in the middle of a fight and he didn't speak to you for a week. When you finally came back to him to apologize, a sobbing wreck, he wordlessly pinned you down against his mattress, fucked you until you bled, and left you a panting mess in his bed while he went to shower for the first time in weeks. 

When you dragged yourself back to your room and checked the mirror to inspect the damage done to your (haggard, disgusting) face, you learned what self-loathing _really_ meant.

XII.

Here is the scene.

There is nobody else in the house but the two of you and you are standing outside of his door and he has barricaded it and you are screaming at him through the wall.

Here is the scene.

Tom has been in the bathroom vomiting all morning and you nod sympathetically while Edd frets about how he could have sworn he had gotten rid of all of the alcohol in the house, really, he had no idea where Tom was still managing to find it.

Here is the scene.

The house is empty except for you and you stare at the empty wall and feel nothing, because he isn't here to make you feel something and you are nothing without him.

Here is the scene.

He locks himself in his room for four days until Tom breaks down the door and Tord is lying in bed, unwashed and unshaven and unmoving and emaciated, and it hits you that you can't remember the last time you saw him eat. 

Here is the scene.

You see him looking up the price of a studio apartment in the city on his brand-new laptop over a breakfast he is resolutely not eating and he sees the flash of panic in your eyes and he stares you down, daring you to pull anything while Edd and Tom are in earshot.

Here is the scene.

He is leaving tomorrow and you lay there alone in your room, searching deep inside yourself for the parts of you that do not depend on him to exist and coming up empty.

XIII.

(Before everything fell apart.)

The night after the first time you'd had sex was the best night of your life.

You had stayed up all night with him, telling stories and secrets as his fingertips caressed the nape of your neck. He told you jokes so bad that you groaned and smiled for you and you alone and when morning came with sleep-deprivation nausea he'd held you, accepted you into his arms. 

It was the first time anyone had ever made you feel cared for. Since that night, you'd been haunted by the stark fact that, when he eventually left you, you would never feel it again.

XIV. 

And when he leaves for good, you give him your most vapid smile and wish him well on his journey and Tord, always your only true mirror, shows you nothing in return.

XV.

And if you choose to forget and let the mask become your face for a while? 

Well. 

Who would ever blame you.

**Author's Note:**

> Just a quick oneshot before finals start well and truly kicking my ass! The quote up top is from Overdose by Grandson, which I listened to on loop while writing this fic. Definite mood music.
> 
> Check @adversarial-official for more info about my posting schedule, because it's pretty erratic at the moment. Catch y'all later!


End file.
